h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I don't want to condemn photography. There are lots of excellent photographs and good photography requires a great deal of skill and patience. But there are definitely photographs that meet your definition of pornography: cute dogs and cats, chocolate-box cottages, and sexy women (and men.) Most of these are harmless.

However, I sometimes wonder if you can get the pleasure you want, or the information you need, from photos, why bother to read? I might put my grumpy old lady hat on and say this. When I was a girl we didn't have TV until I was about 10. I read lots. Do children today have the same incentive to read? End of rant.

Good point about the photography - that's what adverts are made of, too. I think it was Douglas Adams who used the felicitous phrase 'moodily lit tubes of toothpaste'... Drawing works about the same way. Have you seen anime and manga? And then there's Disney...don't get me started...

I just now did a naughty thing with our Twitter account. The Quite Interesting folks have lovely Twitter posts. They put up a 'word of the day' with a photo of a sleeping cat. Several of us razzed them about it. I added, 'The h2g2 Post would never stoop to cat pandering...', quite tongue-in-cheek, as I appended the kitty pic from this week's issue.

On the other hand, a photograph can speak so powerfully as to be life-changing. Think of Dorothea Lange or Ansel Adams.

I don't think reading per se is a sign of intellect. I've seen a lot of people reading on public transport in my time....print equivalents of junk food. Quite a long time ago, I talked with a young woman who commuted to work every day. She bought her paperbacks by the pound. She hefted a tome by Michener...'This will last me all month,' she said with satisfaction.

On the other hand, reading even mental junk food is good for the practice, I imagine. I suspect kids may be reading more than the grownups realise - although a great deal of it may be online. As an online writer, I don't see anything wrong with that...there is material on here that is much superior to a lot of what ends up between two pieces of cardboard.

And yeah, if the bookshelf over my computer screen gets any fuller, it's going to fall down and brain the kitty.

We have a loft full of old books whereas the kids have iPads and phones full of books. Times may change but a reader's always going to be a reader?

Same with photos, boxes and boxes of prints stored away, but thousands of digital images stored on tiny devices. Times may change but a photographer will always be...you get the point.

Adams, Douglas and Ansel, inspired me to pick up a pen, pick up a camera, pick up a book, if an image gets anyone to look further, surely that's a good thing?

Long live moodily lit tubes of toothpaste!

Amen! (And well put!)

Well said indeed!

Very interesting to contemplate 'appetites' - I enjoy an h2g2 kitty picture (that was a great tweet in response to QI!) but there are programmes on TV that are 30 minutes of pure indulgence in kitty pictures and they are too sickly for me. Conversely I know I have books that contain "riveting scenes... that satisfy [me] deeply on some unexamined level" that other people would find too much in turn.

Manga is another one indeed - I enjoy some of those, because on an intellectual level there is an art to reading the stories through understanding the nuances in the shapes of the speech bubbles and background details but also they are very much aimed at the pleasure centres of the brain in the sensuous curves of the lines depicting character features such as long flowing hair

I mostly read and look at h2g2-related material these days but hopefully that means I get a fairly balanced diet:

"there is material on here that is much superior to a lot of what ends up between two pieces of cardboard"

Basically, I don't think there's anything at all wrong with people reading, watching, or listening to material that stimulates pleasure centres. But if you want to be able to go deeper - and particularly, if you're a writer, musician, or artist yourself - it helps to be aware of how these things affect you and your work.

What you do with that knowledge is 'artist's choice', of course.

I don't really dislike animation or graphic novels per se. I just don't like most of it.

To me, Art Spiegelman's 'Maus' is a towering achievement in the graphic field. I remember going to buy the first volume of the graphic novel in a mall in North Carolina in the early 90s. The shopkeeper said, 'Oh? Comic books are over there.' I blinked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maus#/media/File:Art_Spiegelman_-_Maus_(1972)_page_1_panel_3.png

'Maus', of course, isn't meant to stimulate *anybody's* pleasure centres. It uses the same tools as a comic book to achieve another goal.

" It uses the same tools as a comic book to achieve another goal."

Yes, that is a strong technique indeed, to reach different/unexpecting audiences with key messages...